This site hosts my writing and media appearances including news about the documentary movie, Accidental Anarchist. I am a former British diplomat who resigned over the Iraq war. I now run the world's first non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat.

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About

I am a former British diplomat, and Middle East and WMD expert, who resigned in 2004 after giving then-secret evidence to a British inquiry into the Iraq war.

After I quit, I founded the world’s first non-profit diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat, which advises democratic countries and political movements around the world. In 2007, my critique of contemporary diplomacy was published: “Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite”. A new edition was published in 2017.

My experience from inside government dealing with some of the most difficult of contemporary challenges – climate, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan – has convinced me that government, as currently constituted, is a poor and failing mechanism to deal with the world’s problems. We need to look for alternatives, not least action by us, ourselves.

Media Work

My work with Independent Diplomat has been profiled in Buzzfeed, Foreign Policy, the New York Times and Time magazine. This profile in The Observer is a good account of me and my ideas. This interview in the LA Review of Books is the best interrogation of my political ideas. Al Jazeera English broadcast a short documentary about Independent Diplomat’s work. You can see a full list of my press articles and other writing here, and a full list of my other media appearances here, including appearances on The Colbert Report and the Bill Moyers show. You can follow me on Twitter – @carneross

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@carneross on Twitter

Accidental Anarchist film

The Leaderless Revolution

How ordinary people will take power and change politics in the 21st century
Now published in the UK by Simon & Schuster in September 2011, and in the US by Blue Rider Press (Penguin) in January 2012. Click here for more

So bold, so full of incontestable truths and overwhelming convictions, that it should be read by every diplomat, politician and thinking citizen with the courage to pick it up.

John le Carré

Independent Diplomat book

My book, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite, offers a critique of contemporary diplomacy drawn from my own experience as a diplomat. In analysing the many deficits of the current system – and how that system produces bad decisions – it also offers a vision of what can be put right. Buy it now